St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 12, 2005

Pastor Harold T. Nilsson

Romans 5:1-8

I want to talk with you this morning about a subject that I really don’t understand, but which I feel inexorably drawn toward.  That is suffering.  What prompts me to engage you in a conversation about suffering are these provocative words from St. Paul in Romans: “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” 

A couple of mornings ago two items in the news were strangely juxtaposed.  NPR’s Morning Edition had a story about young women cutting themselves, engaging in self-mutilation.  The very thought of it makes me recoil, as it may you.  On the other hand in the depths of your soul you may understand what causes someone to inflict pain on him or herself.  One young woman described her deep inner anxiety and pain that was stilled only as she saw blood flow from her arm.  It is as though the things that are hurting her are leaving her body.  According to those who study this phenomenon, self-injury is an age-old practice that moves across gender and ethnic and income differences in an attempt to silence even more painful suffering.  It points to the truth that suffering is filled with mystery—it is hard to understand—and there unhealthy ways to deal with it.    

The second news item was the story in the Journal about Amy Biehl’s mother.  Amy Biehl, of course, was the Santa Fe High School and Stanford graduate who was helping to develop a new constitution and register voters in South Africa when she was murdered in 1993.  The four young black men who were imprisoned for her murder thought she was just another white South African proponent of apartheid, not someone working for their cause.  Amy’s killers applied for amnesty with the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  In their testimony before the Commission Amy’s parents didn’t oppose amnesty for them and, remarkably, they became quite close to two of the convicted men who now work for the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust in South Africa.  Amy’s father has died, but her mother is continuing to work here and in South Africa for restorative justice and reconciliation.  Linda Biehl shows another side of suffering—that as painful as it is, it need not consume one with bitterness and revenge; that one can grow through it and be transformed.

In the Bible’s view, human suffering is a reality.  It’s the great leveler: it intrudes into everyone’s life.  It can eat away at our happiness.  It can kill our spirits and rob us of joy.  Some of us have suffered more than others, but in time in one form or another, we all meet its reality.  It is no respecter of persons.  Nor of faith.  One of the surprising things you find in the OT is its language of lament.  Its faith doesn’t beat around the bush, but comes right to the point: We’re hurting.  Take Psalm 77, for example.  The psalmist is so troubled that he can’t sleep.  He cries aloud in the middle of the night: “Will God always reject me?  Never again be pleased?  Has God stopped loving me and cut me off for ever?  Can God forget to pity, can anger block God’s mercy?”  Here’s a person honest about feelings.  The reality of suffering is also in today’s gospel reading, as it is most weeks: After caring for the sick, Jesus sends his disciples to do the same.   

Taking the scriptures as our guide, it seems important for us as people of faith to acknowledge our own suffering, to give voice to it.  Avoidance is foolish and even harmful.  We’re not asked to like it; certainly not to go looking for it.  But when we evade the reality of suffering, we end up missing out chances to grow.   When I was a young pastor in San Diego a funeral director asked me to visit his aging mother.  She was nearing the end of her life, and I assumed he wanted me to speak with her about our Christian hope and share scripture passages about the resurrection.  Then he gave me his firm instructions: I don’t want you to talk with her about death or anything morbid.  I could only conclude that he was dedicated to repressing suffering at all costs.  He applied cosmetics to his anxious soul.  He denied himself and his mother important conversation about pain and hope.

As Douglas John Hall notes, there are a couple of other serious consequences of repressing our suffering, of denying our pain.  One is that it becomes much harder to enter imaginatively into the suffering of others.  When we insulate ourselves from pain, we limit our ability to respond with compassion and love to others who are hurting, be they friends close by, hungry persons in our city, AIDS victims in Africa, tsunami victims in Asia, or soldiers and innocent Iraqis devastated by car bombs.  It may be especially hard to enter into someone else’s pain if we suspect that the freedom from suffering that we work hard for may in fact be a source of injustice for others.  (I confess that I wonder about only for a fleeting moment when I pick up a shirt in a store and notice that it was made in Bangladesh or Peru.) 

The other consequence of not acknowledging our suffering says Hall is to search for an enemy, someone to blame for our pain, an inept doctor, a careless driver, an uncaring spouse, or, as it could have been for the Biehl family, angry young men.  Perhaps we want to blame even God.  If we can blame someone “out there,” we avoid not only our pain but perhaps even God. 

Because the God of love for whom we long cannot be known apart from the God who suffers in order to love.  Love and suffering are inextricably joined in our faith tradition.  This is a mystery which I do not fully understand, perhaps because I’ve never had to undergo the depths of suffering that I am sure some of you have.  But there are those who point eloquently to this connection, and I would mention two who have helped me on my journey of understanding.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is now retired from teaching philosophy at Yale and before that at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.  Wolterstorff’s son Eric, a bright, dedicated young man, was killed at age 25 in a freak mountain climbing accident in Austria.  Lament for a Son, a slender book Wolterstorff wrote 1987, documents his journey with grief.  He pours out his heart and wrestles with his faith.  Listen to him for a moment: 

What is suffering?   When something prized or loved is ripped away or never granted—work, someone loved, recognition of one’s dignity, life without physical pain—that is suffering.

Or rather, that’s when suffering happens.  What it is, I do not know.  For many days I had been reflecting on it.  Then, suddenly, as I watched the flicker of orange-pink evening light on almost still water, the thought overwhelmed me: I understand nothing of it.  Of pain, yes: cut fingers, broken bones.  Of sorrow and suffering, nothing at all.  Suffering is a mystery as deep as any in our existence…

We are one in suffering.  Some are wealthy, some bright; some athletic, some admired.  But we all suffer.  For we all prize and love; and in this present existence of ours, prizing and loving yield suffering.  Love in our world is suffering love.  Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much.  Suffering is for the loving.  If I hadn’t loved him, there wouldn’t be this agony. 

This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.  God is love.  That is why [God] suffers.  God so suffered for the world that he gave up his only Son to suffering…

So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.  Suffering is the meaning of our world.  For Love is the meaning.  And Love suffers.  The tears of God are the meaning of history. 

Wolterstorff speaks to my heart, I trust he does to yours.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer does too.  Many of you know his life story of resistance to the Nazis, and his profound writings published after WWII.  A few months before his death on the gallows at Flossenburg, reflecting on Jesus’ death on the cross, Bonhoeffer very simply testifies, “only the suffering God can help.” 

This brings us back full circle to Paul’s provocative phrase, “we boast in our sufferings…”  Is this some kind of arrogance on his part, his bravado to make a case with the congregation in Rome?  I don’t think so.  Because of the peace he felt deep within, the peace won by the suffering of Jesus that he writes about in the first verse of our reading, Paul is saying, I can face anything.  Because I am joined to Jesus, I can endure with integrity and not have my hope shattered.  Paul elaborated on this in another place when he talked about his thorn in the flesh, whatever it was.  He didn’t like; he asked God to take it away, to remove his suffering.  But the answer he got back was that grace is sufficient, for Christ’s power is perfected in weakness.  So Paul contented himself with his sufferings for the sake of Christ, for, as he said, “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

Suffering remains suffering, a deep pain that can break us apart and cancel our dreams.  But it may break us open to receive new things, new experiences that we would never ask for but would never miss out on.  We can complain about suffering, or learn from it.  We can envy the better fortune of others, or thank God for what we have.  We can allow ourselves to be embittered, or let God’s goodness transform us into grateful people.  We can spend our energy trying to run as far from suffering as we can, or choose to face it with the inner resources of endurance, character and hope that God provides in Christ.

Those resources come to us through each other.  The church is a community of hope for the suffering.  I phoned one of my mentors in hope yesterday—in Munich.  Ingrid and Hans Eberhard are members of Andreaskirche, St. Andrew Church, that hosted a number of students from Luther House at UNM over the years.  Shirley and I were sponsors on one of those trips a decade ago, and stayed two weeks with the Eberhards.  We have visited them a number of times since.  Hans, a WWII veteran, is now on dialysis three times a week and in pain day and night.  Ingrid cares for him, and for a grandson, the son of her divorced son who lives with them.  Their daughter who lives in Brazil deals with health issues.  Ingrid acknowledged yesterday that she is tired and under great stress.  But the gifts of endurance, character and hope that I have seen before were in her voice yesterday.  She incarnated once again the peace and love of Christ, and I was encouraged.  That’s how the church works.